It was like a brick-in-the-forehead sort of invention, like putting the peanut butter on the chocolate. Nobody had done it.

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio – Tom Donelan has marketed just two products – playing cards and a poker-based dice game – since he established his home-based Heartland Consumer Products in 2008.

The dice game, invented by an Illinois grandmother, is called Square Shooters. Donelan said more than 250,000 of the games have sold nationwide over the past three years in 12,000 stores, including Walmart, Walgreens and Target.

Donelan, a Strongsville resident, knew from the start that he could develop other games using the same Square Shooters dice. The possibilities seemed endless, and Donelan wasn’t sure which course to take.

“Instead of trying to be judge and jury and tell the American people the best way to play with the dice, we thought we would ask them to tell us,” Donelan, 44, said. So last fall, Donelan ran a website contest on squareshooters.com for the best new dice game. There were more than 100 submissions based on various card games, including poker, canasta and hearts, and existing dice games like Farkle.

The winner, Ryan Strong of Springville, Utah, won $2,000. Heartland wants to market and sell Strong's game, 9 Shooters Quickdraw, and plans to raise investment money this spring on Kickstarter.

Donelan would like to create even more dice games but doubts there is enough physical space for them in retail stores. Instead, he would make them available on the Internet, and aims to start a sister company to market online dice games.

“The contest showed that people like these games in digital form,” Donelan said.

Donelan – who previously worked in retail sales for companies like

Shearer’s Food Inc. – was looking to buy rights to a well-established game product when he founded Heartland Games in 2008. At the time, the company that owned Vegas playing cards had filed for bankruptcy, so he bought the Vegas brand. Three weeks later, the Great Recession hit, and the playing cards and Heartland itself struggled.

“It was like we had a patient on the operating table and the lights went out in the hospital,” Donelan said.

Heartland Games managed to survive the next 18 months, selling its playing cards. Then, in 2010, Carmelyn Calvert, of Eldren, Ill., sent Heartland an email. She had invented and patented a game in which players roll dice for the best poker hand and wanted help promoting it.

Donelan deleted the email, but his marketing director had also received a copy and urged him to take a second look.

“It seemed like someone must have already done something like this,” Donelan said. “It didn’t seem like a remarkable, innovative, sophisticated new thing.

“But that’s where the genius lies. It was like a brick-in-the-forehead sort of invention, like putting the peanut butter on the chocolate. Nobody had done it.”

The game consists of nine dice, each, of course, with six sides. That’s a total of 54 total sides – enough to depict 52 playing cards and two jokers. However, Calvert had to divide the 54 card faces among the nine dice so that any roll can produce any poker hand.

“There are 40 straight-flush combinations in poker,” Donelan said. “She had to figure out a way to arrange the card faces so that you could achieve all 40 of those straight-flush hands. And she was able to accomplish it.”

Donelan said he recognized that Calvert had invented more than a game. It was a game system, ripe with possibilities. Donelan, to come up with Square Shooters, expanded upon Calvert’s idea. His adapted game is similar to Yahtzee, but instead of score sheets it includes game cards, which tell players which poker hand to roll for.

“We constructed the game so that you’re always close to winning,” Donelan said.

Donelan said that for now he will concentrate only on Strong’s 9 Shooters Quickdraw game, at least until it takes root. Then he may look to other game submissions from his contest.

But Donelan will also continue to sell Square Shooters. He says games like that bring families and friends together -- at after-dinner nights, holiday gatherings, cocktail parties -- like nothing else can.

“Those social moments will never go away,” Donelan said. “There is a permanent place for board gaming – and we think a permanent place for cards on dice.”

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